I

IT was a warm night: the stars shone down through the thick
soft air of the Northern Transvaal into the dark earth, where a
little daub‐and‐wattle house of two rooms lay among the long, grassy
slopes.

A light shone through the small window of the house, though it was
past midnight. Presently the upper half of the door opened and then
the lower, and the tall figure of a woman stepped out into the
darkness. She closed the door behind her and walked towards the back
of the house where a large round hut stood; beside it lay a pile of
stumps and branches quite visible when once the eyes grew accustomed
to the darkness. The woman stooped and broke off twigs till she had
her apron full, and then returned slowly, and went into the
house.

The room to which she returned was a small, bare room, with brown
earthen walls and a mud floor; a naked deal table stood in the
centre, and a few dark
page: 12 wooden
chairs, home‐made, with seats of undressed leather, stood round the
walls. In the corner opposite the door was an open fireplace, and on
the earthen hearth stood an iron three‐foot, on which stood a large
black kettle, under which coals were smouldering, though the night
was hot and close. Against the wall on the left side of the room
hung a gun‐rack with three guns upon it, and below it a large
hunting‐watch hung from two nails by its silver chain.

In the corner by the fireplace was a little table with a coffee‐pot
upon it and a dish containing cups and saucers covered with water,
and above it were a few shelves with crockery and a large Bible; but
the dim light of the tallow candle which burnt on the table, with
its wick of twisted rag, hardly made the corners visible. Beside the
table sat a young woman, her head resting on her folded arms, the
light of the tallow candle falling full on her head of pale flaxen
hair, a little tumbled, and drawn behind into a large knot. The arms
crossed on the table, from which the cotton sleeves had fallen back,
were the full, rounded arms of one very young.

The older woman, who had just entered, walked to the fireplace, and
kneeling down before it took from her apron the twigs and sticks she
had gathered and heaped them under the kettle till a blaze sprang up
which illumined the whole room. Then she rose up and sat down on a
chair before the fire, but facing
page: 13
the table, with her hands crossed on her brown apron.

She was a woman of fifty, spare and broad‐shouldered, with black
hair, already slightly streaked with grey; from below high, arched
eyebrows, and a high forehead, full dark eyes looked keenly, and a
sharply cut aquiline nose gave strength to the face; but the mouth
below was somewhat sensitive, and not over‐ full. She crossed and
recrossed her knotted hands on her brown apron.

The woman at the table moaned and moved her head from side to
side.

“What time is it?” she asked.

The older woman crossed the room to where the hunting‐watch hung on
the wall.

It showed a quarter‐past one, she said, and went back to her seat
before the fire, and sat watching the figure beside the table, the
firelight bathing her strong upright form and sharp aquiline
profile.

Nearly fifty years before her parents had left the Cape Colony, and
had set out on the long trek north‐ward, and she, a young child, had
been brought with them. She had no remembrance of the colonial home.
Her first dim memories were of travelling in an ox‐wagon; of dark
nights when a fire was lighted in the open air, and people sat round
it on the ground, and some faces seemed to stand out more than
others in her memory which she thought must be those of
page: 14 her father and mother and of an old
grandmother; she could remember lying awake in the back of the wagon
while it was moving on, and the stars were shining down on her; and
she had a vague memory of great wide plains with buck on them, which
she thought must have been in the Free State. But the first thing
which sprang out sharp and clear from the past was a day when she
and another child, a little boy cousin of her own age, were playing
among the bushes on the bank of a stream; she remembered how,
suddenly, as they looked through the bushes, they saw black men leap
out, and mount the ox‐wagon outspanned under the trees; she
remembered how they shouted and dragged people along, and stabbed
them; she remembered how the blood gushed, and how they, the two
young children among the bushes, lay flat on their stomachs and did
not move or breathe, with that strange self‐preserving instinct
found in the young of animals or men who grow up in the open.

She remembered how black smoke came out at the back of the wagon and
then red tongues of flame through the top; and even that some of the
branches of the tree under which the wagon stood caught fire. She
remembered later, when the black men had gone, and it was dark, that
they were very hungry, and crept out to where the wagon had stood,
and that they looked about on the ground for any scraps of food they
might pick up, and that when they could not
page: 15 find any they cried. She remembered
nothing clearly after that till some men with large beards and large
hats rode up on horseback: it might have been next day or the day
after. She remembered how they jumped off their horses and took them
up in their arms, and how they cried; but that they, the children,
did not cry, they only asked for food. She remembered how one man
took a bit of thick, cold roaster‐cake out of his pocket, and gave
it to her, and how nice it tasted. And she remembered that the men
took them up before them on their horses, and that one man tied her
close to him with a large red handkerchief.

In the years that came she learnt to know that that which she
remembered so clearly was the great and terrible day when, at
Weenen, and in the country round, hundreds of women and children and
youths and old men fell before the Zulus, and the assegais of
Dingaan’s braves drank blood.

She learnt that on that day all of her house and name, from the
grandmother to the baby in arms, fell, and that she only and the boy
cousin, who had hidden with her among the bushes, were left of all
her kin in that Northern world. She learnt, too, that the man who
tied her to him with the red hand‐kerchief took them back to his
wagon, and that he and his wife adopted them, and brought them up
among their own children.

page: 16

She remembered, though less clearly than the day of the fire, how a
few years later they trekked away from Natal, and went through great
mountain ranges, ranges in and near which lay those places the world
was to know later as Laings Nek, and Amajuba, and Ingogo;
Elands‐laagte, Nicholson Nek, and Spion Kop. She remembered how at
last after many wanderings they settled down near the Witwaters
Rand¹, where game was
plentiful and wild beasts were dangerous, but there were no natives,
and they were far from the English rule.

There the two children grew up among the children of those who had
adopted them, and were kindly treated by them as though they were
their own; it yet was but natural that these two of the same name
and blood should grow up with a peculiar tenderness for each other.
And so it came to pass that when they were both eighteen years old
they asked consent of the old people, who gave it gladly, that they
should marry. For a time the young couple lived on in the house with
the old, but after three years they gathered together all their few
goods and in their wagon, with their guns and ammunition and a few
sheep and cattle, they moved away northwards to found their own
home.

For a time they travelled here and travelled there,

¹“Witwaters Rand”—“White water’s ridge,” now known as the Rand,
where Johannesburg and the great mines are situated.

page: 17 but at last they settled on a spot
where game was plentiful and the soil good, and there among the low
undulating slopes, near the bank of a dry sloot, the young man built
at last, with his own hands, a little house of two rooms.

On the long slope across the sloot before the house, he ploughed a
piece of land and enclosed it, and he built kraals for his stock and
so struck root in the land and wandered no more. Those were brave,
glad, free days to the young couple. They lived largely on the game
which the gun brought down, antelope and wildebeest that wandered
even past the doors at night; and now and again a lion was killed:
one no farther than the door of the round hut behind the house where
the meat and the milk were stored, and two were killed at the
kraals. Sometimes, too, traders came with their wagons and in
exchange for skins and fine horns sold sugar and coffee and print
and tan‐cord, and such things as the little household had need of.
The lands yielded richly to them, in maize, and pumpkins, and
sweet‐cane, and melons; and they had nothing to wish for. Then in
time three little sons were born to them, who grew as strong and
vigorous in the free life of the open veld as the young lions in the
long grass and scrub near the river four miles away. Those were
joyous, free years for the man and woman, in which disease, and
carking care, and anxiety played no part.

page: 18

Then came a day when their eldest son was ten years old, and the
father went out a‐hunting with his Kaffir servants: in the evening
they brought him home with a wound eight inches long in his side
where a lioness had torn him; they brought back her skin also, as he
had shot her at last in the hand‐to‐throat struggle. He lingered for
three days and then died. His wife buried him on the low slope to
the left of the house; she and her Kaffir servants alone made the
grave and put him in it, for there were no white men near. Then she
and her sons lived on there; a new root driven deep into the soil
and binding them to it through the grave on the hill‐side. She hung
her husband’s large hunting‐watch up on the wall, and put three of
his guns over it on the rack, and the gun he had in his hand when he
met his death she took down and polished up every day; but one gun
she always kept loaded at the head of her bed in the inner room. She
counted the stock every night and saw that the Kaffirs ploughed the
lands, and she saw to the planting and watering of them herself.

Often as the years passed men of the country‐side, and even from far
off, heard of the young handsome widow who lived alone with her
children and saw to her own stock and lands; and they came
a‐courting. But many of them were afraid to say anything when once
they had come, and those who had spoken to her, when once she had
answered them, never came again.
page: 19
About this time too the country‐side began to fill in; and people
came and settled as near as eight and ten miles away; and as people
increased the game began to vanish, and with the game the lions, so
that the one her husband killed was almost the last ever seen there.
But there was still game enough for food, and when her eldest son
was twelve years old, and she gave him his father’s smallest gun to
go out hunting with, he returned home almost every day with meat
enough for the household tied behind his saddle. And as time passed
she came also to be known through the country‐side as a “wise
woman.” People came to her to ask advice about their illnesses, or
to ask her to dress old wounds that would not heal; and when they
questioned her whether she thought the rains would be early, or the
game plentiful that year, she was nearly always right. So they
called her a “wise woman” because neither she nor they knew any word
in that up‐country speech of theirs for the thing called “genius.”
So all things went well till the eldest son was eighteen, and the
dark beard was beginning to sprout on his face, and his mother began
to think that soon there might be a daughter in the house; for on
Saturday evenings, when his work was done, he put on his best
clothes and rode off to the next farm eight miles away, where was a
young daughter. His mother always saw that he had a freshly ironed
shirt waiting for him on his
page: 20 bed,
when he came home from the kraals on Saturday nights, and she made
plans as to how they would build on two rooms for the new daughter.
At this time he was training young horses to have them ready to sell
when the traders came round: he was a fine rider and it was always
his work. One afternoon he mounted a young horse before the door and
it bucked and threw him. He had often fallen before, but this time
his neck was broken. He lay dead with his head two feet from his
mother’s doorstep. They took up his tall, strong body and the next
day the neighbours came from the next farm and they buried him
beside his father, on the hill‐side, and another root was struck
into the soil. Then the three who were left in the little farm‐house
lived and worked on as before, for a year and more.

Then a small native war broke out, and the young burghers of the
district were called out to help. The second son was very young, but
he was the best shot in the district, so he went away with the
others. Three months after the men came back, but among the few who
did not return was her son. On a hot sunny afternoon, walking
through a mealie field which they thought was deserted and where the
dried yellow stalks stood thick, an assegai thrown from an unseen
hand found him, and he fell there. His comrades took him and buried
him under a large thorn tree, and scraped the earth smooth over him,
that his grave
page: 21 might not be found
by others. So he was not laid on the rise to the left of the house
with his kindred, but his mother’s heart went often to that thorn
tree in the far north. And now again there were only two in the
little mud‐house; as there had been years before when the young man
and wife first settled there. She and her young lad were always
together night and day, and did an that they aid together, as though
they were mother and daughter. He was a fair lad, tall and gentle as
his father had been before him, not huge and dark as his two elder
brothers; but he seemed to ripen towards manhood early. When he was
only sixteen the thick white down was already gathering heavy on his
upper lip; his mother watched him narrowly, and had many thoughts in
her heart. One evening as they sat twisting wicks for the candles
together, she said to him, “You will be eighteen on your next
birthday, my son, that was your father’s age when he married me.” He
said, “Yes,” and they spoke no more then. But later in the evening
when they sat before the door she said to him: “We are very lonely
here. I often long to hear the feet of a little child about the
house, and to see one with your father’s blood in it play before the
door as you and your brothers played. Have you ever thought that you
are the last of your father’s name and blood left here in the north;
that if you died there would be none left?” He said he had thought
of it. Then
page: 22 she told him she
thought it would be well if he went away, to the part of the country
where the people lived who had brought her up: several of the sons
and daughters who had grown up with her had now grown up children.
He might go down and from among them seek out a young girl whom he
liked and who liked him; and if he found her, bring her back as a
wife. The lad thought very well of his mother’s plan. And when three
months were passed, and the ploughing season was over, he rode away
one day, on the best blackhorse they had, his Kaffir boy riding
behind him on another, and his mother stood at the gable watching
them ride away. For three months she heard nothing of him, for
trains were not in those days, and letters came rarely and by
chance, and neither he nor she could read or write. One afternoon
she stood at the gable end as she always stood when her work was
done, looking out along the road that came over the rise, and she
saw a large tent‐wagon coming along it, and her son walking beside
it. She walked to meet it. When she had greeted her son and climbed
into the wagon she found there a girl of fifteen with pale flaxen
hair and large blue eyes whom he had brought home as his wife. Her
father had given her the wagon and oxen as her wedding portion. The
older woman’s heart wrapt itself about the girl as though she had
been the daughter she had dreamed to bear of her own body, and had
never borne.

page: 23

The three lived joyfully at the little house as though they were one
person. The young wife had been accustomed to live in a larger
house, and down south, where they had things they had not here. She
had been to school, and learned to read and write, and she could
even talk a little English; but she longed for none of the things
which she had had; the little brown house was home enough for
her.

After a year a child came, but, whether it were that the mother was
too young, it only opened its eyes for an hour on the world and
closed them again. The young mother wept bitterly, but her husband
folded his arms about her, and the mother comforted both. “You are
young, my children, but we shall yet hear the sound of children’s
voices in the house,” she said; and after a little while the young
mother was well again and things went on peacefully as before in the
little home.

But in the land things were not going on peacefully. That was the
time that the flag to escape from which the people had left their
old homes in the Colony, and had again left Natal when it followed
them there, and had chosen to face the spear of the savage, and the
conflict with wild beasts, and death by hunger and thirst in the
wilderness rather than live under, had by force and fraud unfurled
itself over them again. For the moment a great sullen silence
brooded over the land. The people, slow of thought, slow of
page: 24 speech, determined in action, and
unforgetting; sat still and waited. It was like the silence that
rests over the land before an up‐country thunderstorm breaks.

Then words came, “They have not even given us the free government
they promised”—then acts—the people rose. Even in that remote
country‐side the men began to mount their horses, and with their
guns ride away to help. In the little mud‐house the young wife wept
much when he said that he too was going. But when his mother helped
him pack his saddle‐bags she helped too; and on the day when the men
from the next farm went, he rode away also with his gun by his
side.

No direct news of the one they had sent away came to the waiting
women at the farm‐house; then came fleet reports of the victories of
Ingogo and Amajuba. Then came an afternoon after he had been gone
two months. They had both been to the gable end to look out at the
road, as they did continually amid their work, and they had just
come in to drink their afternoon coffee when the Kaffir maid ran in
to say she saw someone coming along the road who looked like her
master. The women ran out. It was the white horse on which he had
ridden away, but they almost doubted if it were he. He rode bending
on his saddle, with his chin on his breast and his arm hanging at
his side. At first they thought he had
page: 25 been wounded, but when they had helped
him from his horse and brought him into the house they found it was
only a deadly fever which was upon him. He had crept home to them by
small stages. Hardly had he any spirit left to tell them of Ingogo,
Laings Nek, and Amajuba. For fourteen days he grew worse and on the
fifteenth day he died. And the two women buried him where the rest
of his kin lay on the hill‐side.

And so it came to pass that on that warm star‐light night the two
women were alone in the little mud‐house with the stillness of the
veld about them; even their Kaffir servants asleep in their huts
beyond the kraals; and the very sheep lying silent in the starlight.
They two were alone in the little house, but they knew that before
morning they would not be alone, they were awaiting the coming of
the dead man’s child.

The young woman with her head on the table groaned. “If only my
husband were here still,” she wailed. The old woman rose and stood
beside her, passing her hard, work‐worn hand gently over her
shoulder as if she were a little child. At last she induced her to
go and lie down in the inner room. When she had grown quieter and
seemed to have fallen into a light sleep the old woman came to the
front room again. It was almost two o’clock and the fire had burned
low under the large kettle. She scraped the
page: 26 coals together and went out of the front
door to fetch more wood, and closed the door behind her. The night
air struck cool and fresh upon her face after the close air of the
house, the stars seemed to be growing lighter as the night advanced,
they shot down their light as from a million polished steel points.
She walked to the back of the house where, beyond the round hut that
served as a store‐room, the wood‐pile lay. She bent down gathering
sticks and chips till her apron was full, then slowly she raised
herself and stood still. She looked upwards. It was a wonderful
night. The white band of the Milky Way crossed the sky overhead, and
from every side stars threw down their light, sharp as barbed
spears, from the velvety blue‐black of the sky. The woman raised her
hand to her forehead as if pushing the hair farther off it, and
stood motionless, looking up. After a long time she dropped her hand
and began walking slowly towards the house. Yet once or twice on the
way she paused and stood looking up. When she went into the house
the woman in the inner room was again moving and moaning. She laid
the sticks down before the fire and went into the next room. She
bent down over the bed where the younger woman lay, and put her hand
upon her. “My daughter,” she said slowly, “be comforted. A wonderful
thing has happened to me. As I stood out in the starlight it was as
though a voice came down
page: 27 to me and
spoke. The child which will be born of you to‐night will be a
man‐child and he will live to do great things for his land and for
his people.”

Before morning there was the sound of a little wail in the mud‐house:
and the child who was to do great things for his land and for his
people was born.